Thursday, 10 November 2016

“Our world is unbounded by complexity”. Tolomy was living at a time of rapid development and built up an enourmous amount of data. He looked at the data and he mapped planetary movements. But he had the earth at the centre of the movement. It made sense.

The helio-centric model made more sense but faced more significant challenges due to the challenges to the culture this theory made.

Sankeys
Made originally but an engineer captain Sankey to look at steam power and energy loss throughout the process of a steam engine.
Minard’s Napolean’s march into Russia is probably the first that is largely used and most infamous

Sankeys are tough to build in Tableau. There are a lot of steps and a lot of techniques. Chris uses the example of Pablo’s Spanish migration and how a basic set of small multiple histogram show up the trends a lot more clearly

It's not just Pablo. A lot of people have used and built a lot of sankeys. It's not wrong but is it the best way to achieve what you are trying to achieve.

Chris highlights Joe Radburn as he is looking at complex subjects but is visualising them simply. This is arguable just a challenging skill to master.

Kuhn - new discoveries are only made when you don't have a preconception as to what the answer is and the best tool to achieve that preconception. Only exploration will lead to discovery.

Data sources should allow people to explore for themselves, or dashboards to let them answer their curiosity, story points are heavily guided.

Design for mobile is making us think more simply about the message we are trying to convey.

Wednesday, 9 November 2016

Viz 1: Jewel’s Pokemon Go viz
For device designer, text doesn't resize but images do so take images of your titles
Helper buttons are great and useful - create a basic view of just a shape and the customise the tooltip
Jewel’s way to build unit charts is great - she's going to post the calcs on her blog and I will add a photo later [add photo here - remind me if I don’t]
Bring custom shapes in in the same order as the dimension so you can just click assign palette to save having to allocate them all individually
Mapbox used to create a similar map style to match Pokemon Go’s maps
To have different vizzes on your device specific dashboards, then just have the floating element just catching the edge of the dash (please make this easier tableau)

Viz 2: Data Breaches by Marc Schonwadt
There is a lot of custom formatting that you can do with text.
Check out the layout tab to see how someone has built their viz
Hiding index menus using layout containers (set up the hidden element as sitting at negative whatever the width of the layout container.
Jewel just copied across the dashboard which pulled in Robert Rouse’s technique dash to take his helper data with it. Make sure you don’t fit the width as it no longer collapse.

Putting a label on the bar and take away the header. Put the rows on the label and align the text to the left. Then fatten your bars.
Sort your bubble charts but sorting your dimension and sort on what is setting the size
Create custom header called Canva

Analytics
Automatic drill - level of detail goes deeper as you zoom in
Map scaling added in to the maps
Spatial file connector coming in 10.2 beta
Python integration - using python scripts in calculated fields
Tooltip selection - click on the categorical fields in the tooltip to highlight by that selections
Date filters - filter to latest date rather than being stuck on what you originally published as.
Step and Jump lines - squarer trend lines
Advanced conditional formatting

Dashboards and Stories
Distribute evenly to space out your objects on a dashboard
Can add margin around all objects on your dashboard. No more blanks to separate your charts
Expressive text editor - add images and URLs in to text objects (including tooltips)
Web authoring has more right click functionality than before
Story points on the web
Full screen viz on the web

Mobile
Direct linking from subscription emails and condition warnings
Smooth tooltips for mobile. Also easier selection of small marks in a movie cuz. Like selecting where to enter text on a phone when holding down your finger.
Commenting on the go (not just in Desktop and Server)
Offline interactivity

Tuesday, 8 November 2016

Bethany has looked forward to delivering this session for a long time as CDJ (Cross Database Joins) can be used to solve so much

Often most analysts have read only access so don't have the chance to create data
Identify (create vs deriving)
Understand (complexity and volume vs performance)
Use - focus on CDJs as the solution

Example 1
Taking a 12 month subscription from just one row and spreading it across the 12 months (on a monthly basis) to show the monthly revenue. Use a simple excel scaffold of month number and a key of 1 to create the product join.

To create the filter of finding when the contracts will earn revenue up to, Bethany used a Boolean filter calf but then added it to the data source filters to cut down on the processing done locally on your machine.

V10.2 adding joins based on calcs

Example 2

Counting staff employed at any single point in time - use missing values to fill the gaps on the table calcs

A scaffold of all dates is needed though and the just return those that are after hire and pre-termination date.

What if the scaffold creates huge amounts of rows?
I.e. If you have seconds a tool is active, you can scaffold on a day level and the create a calc that then counts a full day’s worth of seconds (86,400) but if a partial day then use a datediff() calc

Visual Design Tricks for Dashboarding by Andy at
tabsoft.co/designmonth for the resources

Dashboarding styles and sophistication develops over time. This is true for Andy (and all of us)

Iraq’s bloody toll dashboard is easy to change to change the feel of the dashboard. Here’s the original: http://gravyanecdote.com/tag/iraqs-bloody-toll/
Orientation, colour and title can completely transform the meaning of the dashboard

Instant analytics
Reference lines with key numbers
Select time and the call out labels will show change (taken from Vizable)
Instant multiple visualisations to push you to explore new angles
Summary of the clusters when you hover over the cluster to show the key attributes about that cluster
Time & Space analytics
Add geographic elements just based on the long / lat of the data. You won't need the data fields there. Tableau will do that for you.
Long / lat to join data sets
Drag and drop indexing of time based data

Natural Language support
Lets you type the question you want to know and Tableau will add elements that allow you to filter by the ambiguous terms. Called Eviza.

Data Engine
Hyper
From next year we will have access to this - faster data analysis, data ingestion and enterprise scalability
HyPer can load and analyse data at the same time. Real time ingestion.

Data Management
Balance between governance and freedom
Certified data sources by key server users so the users know that data source is correct and accurate
Icons to show when users have added calculations to the data source. Quick way to recommend new data field be added to the certified data source
Data fields measured by how often they are used
Seeing which workbooks are created from the data source and which fields are used where. Can add data fields with just drag and drop.

Data preparation
Project Maestro - new product for data prep and integration
Drag and drop joins within reference tables
Maestro available later next year

Cloud
Three aims: connectivity, simplicity, anywhere
Live query agent - a secure tunnel through to on premise data sources
Prebuilt templates of dashboards as datasets are consistent with cloud applications
Aim by end of next year to have everything in browser editing that is in Desktop
Save once, see everywhere - save offline and then published when next on the web
Server has recommendations on how to manage capacity and the a couple of clicks to update
Tableau server on Linux - ready for release next year

Collaboration
Drive a culture of analytics
Machine learning on server to serve up individual preferences
Discussion chat in the server browser and desktop
Data driven alerting is coming soon - simple click on the metric to set up
Metrics - save metrics from different dashboards to pull the key elements of your business together
Safe and secure discovery - personal sand boxing and team sand boxes too